Top 500 Matt Haig Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Life is hard. It may be beautiful and wonderful but it is also hard.”

— Matt Haig

352. “The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe’s worth of darkness.”

— Matt Haig

353. “Technology won’t save humankind. Humans will.”

— Matt Haig

354. “Experience surrounds innocence and innocence can never be regained once lost.”

— Matt Haig

355. “If pills work for you it doesn’t really matter if this is to do with serotonin or another process or anything else.- keep taking them. Hell, if licking wallpaper does it for you, do that. I am not anti pill. I am pro anything that works and I know pill do work for a lot of people.”

— Matt Haig

356. “From the outside a person sees your physical form, sees that you are a unified mass of atoms and cells. Yet inside you feel like a Big Bang has happened. You feel lost, disintegrated, spread across the universe amid infinite dark space.”

— Matt Haig

357. “Confine your imagination. Do not lose yourself to dangerous daydreams. Do not sit and ponder and dwell on a life you are not living. Do something active. Exercise. Work harder. Answer your emails. Fill your diary with harmless social activities. By doing, we stop ourselves imagining. And imagining for us is a fast-moving car heading toward a cliff.”

— Matt Haig

358. “The art of swimming... was about purity. The more focused you were on the activity, the less focused you were on everything else. You kind of stopped being you and became the thing you were doing.”

— Matt Haig

359. “It’ hard to explain depression to people who haven’t suffered from it. It is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren’t there. You have to resort to metaphors.”

— Matt Haig

360. “We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don’t need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything. Invisible sharks One frustration with anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it.”

— Matt Haig

361. “There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping.”

— Matt Haig

362. “Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.”

— Matt Haig

363. “Because life is frightening, and it is frightening for a reason, and the reason is that it doesn’t matter which branch of a life we get to live, we are always the same rotten tree.”

— Matt Haig

364. “Reading Schopenhauer when you felt melancholy was like taking off your clothes when you felt cold, but a line of his came back to me.”

— Matt Haig

365. “He wrote me a prescription for more diazepam and advised I take things “one day at a time,” as if there were another way for days to be experienced.”

— Matt Haig

366. “Willie Nelson once said that sometimes, you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option, I suppose, is that you write a book.”

— Matt Haig

367. “To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it.”

— Matt Haig

368. “I didn’t go too far before I saw her. She was walking on the other side of the street and she didn’t see me. It was strange, the significance of that moment for me and the insignificance of it for her. But then I reminded myself that when galaxies collide, they pass right through.”

— Matt Haig

369. “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment. Live in the breath.”

— Matt Haig

370. “There will be other days. And other feelings.”

— Matt Haig

371. “So every human inhabitant on this freak wonder of a planet shares the same core. I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.”

— Matt Haig

372. “And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.”

— Matt Haig

373. “Kindness is a boomerang. You throw it out and you get it back. You had done kind things in the world, and you had been rewarded with kindness in return.”

— Matt Haig

374. “He believed that the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became.”

— Matt Haig

375. “When there is nothing we can do about something, the point of worry begins to diminish. “Everybody dies,” wrote Nora Ephron.” There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day.”

— Matt Haig

376. “Talk. Listen. Encourage talking. Encourage listening. Keep adding to the conversation. Stay on the lookout for those wanting to join in the conversation. Keep reiterating, again and again, that depression is not something you ‘admit to’, it is not something you have to blush about, it is a human experience.”

— Matt Haig

377. “Light was everything. Sunshine, windows with the blinds open. Pages with short chapters and lots of white space and Short. Paragraphs. Light was everything. But so, increasingly, were books. I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. I mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there is a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books.”

— Matt Haig

378. “Continually looking for the meaning of life is like looking for the meaning of toast. It is sometimes better just to eat the toast.”

— Matt Haig

379. “She would see, for instance, her mother touch my hand and say, ‘If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.’ Or, on questioning why she looked so sad, she would remark, ‘My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.’ ‘That’s Montaigne, isn’t it?”

— Matt Haig

380. “If you have ever believed a depressive wants to be happy, you are wrong. They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain.”

— Matt Haig

381. “On Earth, incidentally, civilization is the result of a group of humans coming together and suppressing their instincts.”

— Matt Haig

382. “Be nice to other people. At the universal level, they are you.”

— Matt Haig

383. “I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die.”

— Matt Haig

384. “So he knew terrible things- even the most terrible things-couldn’t stop the world from turning. Life went on. And he made a promise to himself that, when he grew older, he’d try to be like his mother. Colourful, and happy and kind and full of joy.”

— Matt Haig

385. “No one is ever completely right about anything. Anywhere.”

— Matt Haig

386. “An annoying thing about depression is that thinking about life is inevitable. Depression makes thinkers out of all of us.”

— Matt Haig

387. “The world exists in you. Your experience of the world isn’t this objective unchangeable thing called “The World.” No. Your experience of the world is your interaction with it, your interpretation of it. To a certain degree we all make our own worlds.”

— Matt Haig

388. “We have the knowledge to realise we are just a mess of quanta and particles, like everything else is, and yet we keep trying to separate ourselves from the universe we live in, to give ourselves a meaning above that of a tree or a rock or a cat or a turtle.”

— Matt Haig

389. “No drug in the universe will make you feel better, at the deepest level, than being kind to other people.”

— Matt Haig

390. “The world is real, but your world is subjective. Changing your perspective changes your planet.”

— Matt Haig

391. “There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.”

— Matt Haig

392. “Understand people are more than a social media post. Think how many conflicting thoughts you have in a day. Think of the different contradictory positions you have held in your life. Respond to online opinions but never let one rushed opinion define a whole human being. “Every one of us,” said the physicist Carl Sagan, “is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

— Matt Haig

393. “Yes, there had been a void inside me, but voids were underrated. Voids were empty of love but also pain. Emptiness was not without its advantages. You could move around in emptiness.”

— Matt Haig

394. “To see something, you have to believe in it. Really believe it. That’s the first elf rule. You can’t see something you don’t believe in. Now try your hardest and see if you can see what you have been looking for.”

— Matt Haig

395. “Let’s just understand this. If we are tired or hungry or hungover, we are likely to be in a bad mood. That bad mood is therefore not really us. To believe in the things we feel at that point is wrong, because those feelings would disappear with food or sleep.”

— Matt Haig

396. “Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted.”

— Matt Haig

397. “I’ve never had a coconut chilli Martini before,′ I tell him. ‘That’s the thing with getting older. You run out of new things to try.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says, still the optimist. ‘I have lived beside one ocean or another most of my life and I have yet to see the same wave twice. It’s the mana, you see. It’s everywhere. It’s never still. It keeps the world new. The whole planet is a coconut chilli Martini.”

— Matt Haig

398. “The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.”

— Matt Haig

399. “The more you research the science of depression, the more you realise it is still more characterised by what we don’t know than what we do. It is 90 per cent mystery.”

— Matt Haig

400. “Sentimentality is another human flaw. A distortion. Another twisted by-product of love, serving no rational purpose. And yet, there was a force behind it as authentic as any other.”

— Matt Haig